Sylvia Ann Hewlett #640

The #MeToo movement has lifted a heavy burden of pain and shame for millions of women (and many men, too), spearheading a huge shift in public opinion and initiating some clear-cut gains. “But despite the proliferation of cases, some days it seems that we’ve made little progress in figuring out how to deal—consistently and fairly—with either the predators or the prey,” writes renowned labor economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett in #MeToo in the Corporate World: Power, Privilege, and the Path Forward.

Sylvia also documents the collateral damage inflicted by #MeToo—both the financial hits to the bottom line (lawsuits and settlements, tarnished brands, and stock devaluations) and the adverse effect on the talent pipeline. With male leaders more and more reluctant to mentor young woman, for example, it can mean that women will stall out mid-career and their companies will be deprived of diversity in the C-Suite. In the final third of the book, Hewlett offers her three-pronged strategy, which can be used to protect employees and the businesses they work for. Examining companies as different as IBM and IPG she discusses “experiments at the edge” as well as more evolved initiatives that have been put in place.

Award-winning author Sylvia Ann Hewlett is an economist and the CEO of Hewlett Consulting Partners. She is also the founder and Chair Emeritus of the Center for talent Innovation. The author of fourteen critically acclaimed books, including When the Bough Breaks (which won a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award), Executive Presence (Amazon Best Book of the Month) and The Sponsor Effect (Financial Times Business Book of the Month), Hewlett has taught at Columbia and Princeton Universities and been honored by Google with its Global Diversity Award. A graduate of Cambridge University, she won a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard University and earned her PhD at London University. She lives with her family in New York City.

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